#its thematic purpose

[wowitsverycool]

please i don't want my video games to be toys. if the point of your game is to frustrate me by god please do that.... i feel sometimes that games are held back as an artform by their need to be. like. Products. in the sense that they're expected to be entertainment first and art second, yknow? a game will get praised for its wonderful story, but only if that story supports a Fun gimmick. it's like the art in games is seen as a vehicle through which gameplay is delivered, and when gameplay exists in service of artistic intent, it makes that game a Failed Product.

[the-solar-system52]

i love how the space odyssey fandom just collectively decided not to talk about the giant floating space baby

[metanarrates]

orv's usage of symbolism is interesting because it rarely has symbols As Simply Symbols. a good 95% of the time, its symbols are often primarily plot-related mechanical stuff, like the fourth wall, or unbroken faith. they are things that move the plot along and are used as tools in-universe to solve problems. one of the genius elements of the skills/stigmata system is that those abilities do INCREDIBLE heavy lifting for characterization, by both being talents the characters can apply in ways that reveal who they are as people, and by being symbols that reveal aspects of a character by the mere fact of the character possessing them.

this is very unlike a lot of other stories! most of the time, if something exists in a work to be a symbol, the symbolism is its primary narrative function, and any other plot-moving functions are secondary or nonexistent. and most of the time, that's totally fine. orv has symbols that work that way too: the white and black coats (and by extension white page/black letters) and the squared circle. they're images that serve to inform the reader about integral ideas to the story.

but it's brilliant for a story that is primarily fantasy-action-adventure to take its mechanical plot items or skills, which are incredibly necessary to the progression most fantasy action stories, and then have them be incredibly symbolic. it's not new ground to break, either. this is something a lot of fantasy stories do. but it feels very unique because of how symbolically charged nearly EVERYTHING is, and how in-depth the symbolism often is! especially for the really major plot mechanics (fourth wall as ultimate example) they often serve as metaphor for a number of things simultaneously. it makes for a reading experience that is very engaging because there's always so much going on, and it often makes the reader feel clever for noticing it!

[spider-man-2o99]

The prevailing belief of many ASTV viewers seems to be that Miguel O'Hara is an actual, literal vampire. Do you think this funny.

Nope! <3 it shows such a lack of willingness to do even Basic Research that would take maybe two seconds to look up that it makes me want to Kill. like. cmon. he has Fangs because he's half-spider...,,.,

They're hollow, and whenever he Bites People, it is specifically with the intent to POISON them with the VENOM from his FANGS-- he also Says That every time he does it, like he's an anime character, lol, and it means a lot to me. we don't know the exact makeup or potency of his venom, but we Do know that it's fast-acting, paralytic, and (apparently, thankfully) non-toxic, at least.

[pequodyaoi]

Peace sells... but who's buying?

[nekropsii]

Hello??? Is SOV Cronus fucking good? Tf happened to him

Do you mean how bony he is? If so, then... Nothing happened to him, really. His lusus is a seahorse. They're just built like that. Here's an example, since apparently a lot of people don't actually know that seahorses are basically just skin and bone.

For the record, sov!Cronus is not supposed to be pleasant to look at. He's supposed to look at least a little offputting and creepy. The level of skinny he is isn't supposed to be inspiring or anything. It is a fun design though, for me at least. Fan designs for Cronus often lean extremely heavily into making him excessively physically attractive, for some unknown reason, and that's pretty... Boring. It doesn't add any character. Decided to visually fuck him up completely to add some diversity to the pool. We need more alien freakazoids.

[technicolorxsn]

Why can't you see this is the will of God?

[legionofpotatoes]

I played Season over the weekend, which if I had to condense "thematic meandering" into a videogame is probably what I would most closely end up with; but it was still a cozy chill time that targeted my very specific niche of robust cow petting mechanics. Followed by journaling the heck out of them.

I do think cute indies living and dying by their sincere desire to paint the human condition should never ever ever fall into the temptation of obtuse and nebulous worldbuilding that desperately needs to explain itself so it can function as an aesthetic blanket for their vignettes. Just keep it loose and metaphor-heavy, fellas.

Cause if you're not extremely, painfully specific about your intention with a story that centers ignorant tourism and historic preservation, you're gonna beef it, bud

[istherewifiinhell]

hang on. hang on. okay. IS THIS A SAFE SPACE. is it a god damn safe space to say on my blog [prev post] DITTO............ U_U

that IS in fact. a transcendently good piece of writing actually grappling with the politics and ideological of a war. evocating visuals and emotions that are so fucking resonant and completely true the very alien prespectives they come from.

it is quite literally a claustrophobic story though the nature of claustrophobia filtered through beings who dont worry about suffication or starvation as matter air and food but a matter of geological eras and what i can only assume some atomic grade power sources.

there is poetry. and there are notes about the intranslatablity of poetry that literally cannot be experienced by a human brain.

HUH? yeah. and the dorsal port fucking.

[gr-74]

@doomgay tagged me to post the 5 songs ive been listening to lately but the reality of my situation is that ever since spotify added daylists i just listen to that and take what it gives me. and if that fails its my 700+ songs synthwaveish playlist instead. and i just very rarely deliberately pick any single song. truly every day i Am shuffling. my music. so im cheating and going off my on repeat playlist Ok?

resist and disorder - rezodrone/the cartesian duelists

synthwave is dead - we are magonia

vengeance - cloud battalion

young blood - nightstop

blood in blood out - vhs glitch

idk who to tag that wasnt alrdy tagged Uhhh what Everrrr if you see this and wanna do it i hereby grant you permission. or something

[96percentdone]

The thing about dying on this hill about how badly the narrative treats Kawahara in Chaos;Child is knowing that literally no one even knows what chaos;child is so why I'm sitting on this hill screaming and bleeding out is incomprehensible but. The thing is. I'm right! They treat Kawahara so bad it's unreal!

I know the writers do not give a shit about him at all which is why he's treated like a delusional entitled bully instead of like. A victim of 6 years of gaslighting and manipulation that he NEVER gets closure for or even TOLD he's being deceived and in fact the fact he doesn't know that he's being deceived and strung along is used as a thing Takuru can own him over, but tbh. That literally only makes it worse in my book.

You like didn't even need to put him in the work if the only way you were really going to use him is like this, as he otherwise basically doesn't exist in the vn outside this one route. You did not need him! His role in this one route isn't even necessary for the story they want to tell in it, never mind outside it. You don't care about him clearly, so you could have just not done this!

But no, they needed to include him for some reason, so what you get is a guy being treated as a villain and an idiot you're supposed to hate for lashing out at the wrong person about the abuse he's been subjected to by one of the heroines for SIX years that he cannot possibly begin to understand the extent of, and he DESERVES to be clowned on for NOT KNOWING THE NATURE OF HIS ABUSE because he's mean to Takuru. In. In a VN where the main take-away, the emotional culmination of its story is that Takuru is not the most special boy in the universe, and is not better than everyone else. Yeah. Sure. Okay. This is fine.

I'm gonna stay mad forever thanks!

[gothamcityneedsme]

i want a game like jade empire again

[unidentifiedfroggy]

there's just something about kanaya "it is my duty and hatchright as a jadeblood and as a person to nurture and resurrect trollkind" maryam and rose "i chafe against any and all authority and i will make my own path to victory if it kills me" lalonde finding love in one another that makes me go !!

[20cm]

btw my thoughts on tnc:t are:

all bangers no skips i love all 5 tracks so badly 🫶🫶🫶

[mcmansionhell]

we've found it folks: mcmansion heaven

Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "Come on, Kate, that's a little kooky, but certainly it's not McMansion Heaven. This is very much a house in the earthly realm. Purgatory. McMansion Purgatory." Well, let me now play Beatrice to your Dante, young Pilgrim. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water. Look at it. Just look.

The inside is white. This makes it dreamlike, almost benevolent. It is bright because this is McMansion Heaven and Gray is for McMansion Hell. There is an overbearing sheen of 80s optimism. In this house, the credit default swap has not yet been invented, but could be.

It takes a lot for me to drop the cocaine word because I think it's a cheap joke. But there's something about this example that makes it plausible, not in a derogatory way, but in a liberatory one, a sensuous one. Someone created this house to have a particular experience, a particular feeling. It possesses an element of true fantasy, the thematic. Its rooms are not meant to be one cohesive composition, but rather a series of scenes, of vastly different spatial moments, compressed, expanded, bright, close.

And then there's this kitchen for some reason. Or so you think. Everything the interior design tries to hide, namely how unceasingly peculiar the house is, it is not entirely able to because the choices made here remain decadent, indulgent, albeit in a more familiar way.

Rare is it to discover an interior wherein one truly must wear sunglasses. The environment created in service to transparency has to somewhat prevent the elements from penetrating too deep while retaining their desirable qualities. I don't think an architect designed this house. An architect would have had access to specifically engineered products for this purpose. Whoever built this house had certain access to architectural catalogues but not those used in the highest end or most structurally complex projects. The customization here lies in the assemblage of materials and in doing so stretches them to the height of their imaginative capacity. To borrow from Charles Jencks, ad-hoc is a perfect description. It is an architecture of availability and of adventure.

A small interlude. We are outside. There is no rear exterior view of this house because it would be impossible to get one from the scrawny lawn that lies at its depths. This space is intended to serve the same purpose, which is to look upon the house itself as much as gaze from the house to the world beyond.

Living in a city, I often think about exhibitionism. Living in a city is inherently exhibitionist. A house is a permeable visible surface; it is entirely possible that someone will catch a glimpse of me they're not supposed to when I rush to the living room in only a t-shirt to turn out the light before bed. But this is a space that is only exhibitionist in the sense that it is an architecture of exposure, and yet this exposure would not be possible without the protection of the site, of the distance from every other pair of eyes. In this respect, a double freedom is secured. The window intimates the potential of seeing. But no one sees.

At the heart of this house lies a strange mix of concepts. Postmodern classicist columns of the Disney World set. The unpolished edge of the vernacular. There is also an organicist bent to the whole thing, something more Goff than Gaudí, and here we see some of the house's most organic forms, the monolith- or shell-like vanity mixed with the luminous artifice of mirrors and white. A backlit cave, primitive and performative at the same time, which is, in essence, the dialectic of the luxury bathroom.

And yet our McMansion Heaven is still a McMansion. It is still an accumulation of deliberate signifiers of wealth, very much a construction with the secondary purpose of invoking envy, a palatial residence designed without much cohesion. The presence of golf, of wood, of masculine and patriarchal symbolism with an undercurrent of luxury drives that point home. The McMansion can aspire to an art form, but there are still many levels to ascend before one gets to where God's sitting.

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[whatwillyousing]

like idk i think if youre going to make the emotional thesis of your game be about how you have to let things go & that you can't keep on living the same way with the same people forever then you should. maybe follow through on that. and actually demonstrate this as fact for how your story functions